cellio | assorted mysteries (and some links)

My printer has started acting up in a weird way. For a while now, it has declined to correctly print certain pages from one application (Trope Trainer); it'll print most of a page, then feed a new piece of paper and print the rest on that page (in the correct position), and then do the same thing on subsequent pages. But since the break is usually in the middle of a line of text, with some bit loss, that's not helpful. And it only happens with the larger-print Hebrew pages, which is weird -- so it's not the program itself. Well, tonight I tried to print my sermon for this Shabbat -- just an RTF document, printed from Wordpad -- and for the first time it's doing the same thing to me with text. WTF? This is not a normal failure mode for laser printers, in my limited experience. I wonder what it means. I hope it doesn't mean "ten years is more than you should expect from an infrequently-used printer", but I suspect it does.

Amazon has this thing called "gold box", where they offer you slightly-discounted prices on products they think you'd like. Sometimes they're right; I've bought a few things that way. But I'd really like to send them a message: I will not buy (1) things I already own (and that I bought from you, so you should know); (2) a bike via mail order; (3) golf clubs; or (4) fancy-schmancy purses priced in the hundreds of dollars. (Heck, I wouldn't buy a purse priced in the tens of dollars.) Where on earth do they get some of these ideas? I had assumed paid placements, and maybe that's true, but I've been seeing the purses (or sometimes wallets, also around $200) for months, intermittently. Huh?

Our congregation is hiring an associate rabbi, and we're going through placement with HUC for someone from this year's class. The process was described as similar to assigning residencies for medical school: each employer produces an ordered list of students it would hire and each student produces an ordered list of jobs he would take, and then the matching is done and you find out who you got. I found myself wondering today whether the algorithm optimizes locally or globally. Suppose you have a student S1 who chooses congregations C1 and C2, and another student S2 who chooses C3 and C1, and suppose C3 doesn't choose S2 and C1 will take either student. Do they match S1 to C1 to give S1 his first choice (and it's just too bad that S2 lost out), or do they match S1 to C2 so that S2 gets a congregation, each student getting his second choice? Does C1's ranking of S1 and S2 matter in this case? I wonder if participants are allowed to know this stuff, or if they fear people gaming the system.

Links:

The Straight Dope on the number of the beast (history and humor). I particularly like "$665.95: retail price of the beast". I had previously heard "668: the neighbor of the beast". Link from cvirtue.

This was posted to lj_nifty: a map showing where your LJ friends are located (replace my user name with yours in the URL). As of this posting it only covers North America. It's also very slow at the moment, though it worked fine for me earlier.

assorted mysteries (and some links)

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